


Paper games

by CynicalRainbows



Series: Developing Bonds (Or: Martha's relationships with the other girls) [2]
Category: The Wilds (TV 2020)
Genre: Awkwardness, Friendship, Martha is a cinnamon roll
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:41:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29133474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CynicalRainbows/pseuds/CynicalRainbows
Summary: Nora is quiet. This makes Martha uncomfortable.(Or: the Martha-Nora friendship that I wish the show had more of!)
Relationships: Martha Blackburn & Nora Reid, Martha Blackburn & Toni Shalifoe
Series: Developing Bonds (Or: Martha's relationships with the other girls) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2142363
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	Paper games

They’re the only ones on the beach: Nora’s watching the fire and Martha is waiting for the rest of her do-jack-shit day (as designated by the chore chart) to be over. She’s impatient: time passes more slowly without the routine tasks that she and the others have come to depend on to structure their days and conversation with the others feels somehow more difficult without the bond of sweat and stubbed toes that usually provides a conversational lubricant.

(Leah had used the phrase conversational lubricant with a straight face on Day Three and Fatin had laughed so hard she’d had to sit down.)

She plops down on the log beside Nora and then immediately regrets it: now she’s sat down, she’s either going to have to find a believable pretext for getting up again immediately or wait around for long enough that getting up won’t seem rude.

(This is one of the things that she’d like to be able to complain to Toni about later and yet definitely won’t; Toni would never be able to understand. 

Martha had once tried to explain to her how the agony of getting up to make the long solo trek across the cafeteria in the first few awkward weeks of high school far outweighed the benefit of ketchup packets for her fries. Toni had looked at her as if she was speaking Latin and rolled her eyes.

“It’s a few steps across a room Marty.”

“Yeah but-”

She’d given up. Toni never could, never would be able to understand, which Martha thinks, is probably a good thing. Toni has been judged too many times too harshly by too many people for self consciousness to have endured long- not caring is the only weapon in her arsenal against everything the world has to throw at her.

Even so, after that conversation, Toni always brings extra ketchup packets back to their table when she collects her own lunch.)

Nora glances up as Martha sits, with the little quirk of her lips that passes for a greeting and may or may not be a smile and goes back to her journal without a word.

Great.

Now she’s disturbing Nora’s peace  _ and _ making herself uncomfortable for nothing and she can’t even think of anything to say.

If she was Shelby, she’d have something nice to say, some compliment to break the ice. She’d smile and draw Nora out of herself and everything would be fine.

(If she was Leah, she’d be too deep in her own thoughts to even notice Nora next to her.)

If she was Fatin, she’d talk too- not to make the other person feel warm and welcomed like Shelby would. It would be because she’d feel like talking, and fuck them if they didn’t like it, _ do you have something more interesting to say bitch? _

(She’d flinched slightly the first time Fatin had applied the epithet to her, and then waited anxiously for two days, waiting and hoping for her to do it again, the minute that she realised it was what Fatin called everybody.)

If she was Toni or Dot or Rachel, she’d have no problem sitting in stubborn, stoic silence unless there was something  _ real _ to say….

But she isn’t Toni. She isn’t any of them.

But she isn’t stubborn. She isn’t stoic. She likes to think she’s friendly, but she lacks the imperviousness that makes Shelby such a force of nature. 

Rejection stings her enough to make her reluctant to make overtures that she’s sure won’t be returned; it makes her tongue tied and anxious when she’d like to be bright and breezy.

(Toni once compared her to a hedgehog.

“Why?” 

They’re eating the lunches Bernice packed for them under a tree, and it would be nice, if it was just them.

She doesn’t really care: she’s too humiliated, after having spent the whole morning of the first day of day camp-  _ Charity Camp,  _ Toni kept calling it, until a counsellor made her stop- in flushed-cheeked silence when her bright “Hi!” to the girls at the same table had been met with a flurry of giggles and whispered comments.

Toni had held her hand under the desk until morning break and then calmly and systematically shredded each of the girls freshly tye-dyed tshirts while Martha was in the bathroom.

“You’re all cute and friendly and then something spooks you and you’re like-” Toni makes her hand into a clenched fist. “Into a ball.”

She gives Toni a shove.

“I’m not spiky though!”

“Nah,” Toni admits, unruffled. “Maybe you’re like the ones you have on your slippers. Soft spines. You still do the curling-up thing though.”

She sticks out her tongue.

It’s  _ true  _ but  _ still. _ )

She’s not even, now she thinks about, sure that she’d be able to hold Nora’s attention if she  _ did _ think of something to say: Nora is quiet but clever in a way that’s slightly intimidating, and her lack of expression means that it’s not easy to pick up cues from her. What if Martha starts talking and it just confirms Nora’s view that she’s a complete idiot and really annoying?

Which- she isn’t. She knows that. But she doesn’t know it enough to stop her from caring whether or not other people think she  _ is _ .

The silence is making her twitchy. Sitting down was a mistake, she knows it, she’s hopelessly dull and-

Nora nudges her knee with the notebook and Martha sees her own face, rendered in blue biro. 

“Oh!” She isn’t quite sure what her response is meant to be. “That’s amazing! It’s really neat- it…”

She’s babbling. She stops herself, and then takes the notebook to examine the picture more clearly.

Nora offers her the pen too and she takes it, before realising she has not the faintest clue what to do with it. Any sort of drawing she could do- even the best putting-in-effort sort- would look stupid next to Nora’s talent.

She draws a line. Then another. She makes a grid and makes an x in the upper left hand corner.

Then she offers both pen and notebook back, not quite daring to look in case Nora is raising an eyebrow.

(She’d really like Toni to come back and break the tension about now.)

Eventually, after an excruciating pause, notebook and pen slide from her hands and are almost immediately returned, except now there’s an O in the middle of the grid.

When she looks up, Nora’s looking at her with the little quirk of the lips.

(It’s definitely a smile. And honestly, Martha isn’t sure how she ever doubted it.)


End file.
